Greetings from the premises of a brick and mortar gender identity clinic in a major city, where I have just confirmed with yet another qualified clinician that you do not need body dysphoria to be trans or use hormones. Also that nonbinary is a valid identity they accommodate and have a specialist in. Also I might get to teach in association with them! Maybe.
Just wanted to say it's great to see you around again!
Aww thanks! I am around, just on a more occasional basis. If you need me there’s always hangouts!
The truscum are scummy throw a sponge at them
Good idea!
THIS IS WORSE THAN WATERGATE
Just in case NPR, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and every other major news organization isn’t enough for some of you, Snopes has also confirmed that Russian government interfered with the US election. Not just that, but the CIA knew about this all the way in October, and the GOP controlled Senate sat on the information.
This is in fact far, far worse than Watergate.
The idea that they must accommodate respectability to “a reasonable extent” while still trying to maintain the illusion of progressive politics, honestly.
I’ve given up expecting not to get angry, but I was at least hoping to make it to the end of my shift tonight before someone said or did something upsetting.
Yeah, while not realizing that it's precisely this attitude that makes their conditional "support" meaningless.
Seriously it helps to treat these interactions like they're pointless. There are people here who will never get it but at least that serves as a teaching moment for everyone else.
‘Fake news.’ Call them exactly what they actually are in these articles: propaganda.
attn: @luchagcaileag, @bogleech et al: since That Thing™ seems to be rearing its ugly head again today, here’s a recent, fairly sharp thinkpiece on it.
Just out of curiosity what was your reasoning for starting T? I have heard of non-dysphoric trans people but I haven't heard of starting T without experiencing dysphoria so that's why I am asking.
I got fed up with being misgendered every time I left the house.
Some would say that’s social dysphoria, but I don’t agree with this idea of locating the “wrong” in the individual person when it’s society that coercively genders people based on a few outdated rules about looks. I never liked boring macho outfits and I didn’t want to put on an overly masculine performance just to try to avoid the misgendering that way (and even then, I probably would’ve been just assumed to be a butch lesbian and misgendered anyway because of my “girly” features).
As it is now, I can dress in whatever I want, I don’t bother binding or packing (I never did as I have no problem with my anatomy), I can grow my hair, I can wear bright colours or not, and still after years on T no one questions me to the point of degendering. They may be thinking I’m “girly” or whatever, but they don’t assume “this person must be female”. So I can go places and not fret over this constantly. I don’t have to explain myself to every random stranger or endure the misgendering instead. I don’t have to deal with people’s cissexism every single time I interact with anyone who doesn’t already know me. It definitely brought my stress levels down.
That’s reason enough.
Yikes.
god why are cis people like this?!
Why are transphobes like this?
Just out of curiosity what was your reasoning for starting T? I have heard of non-dysphoric trans people but I haven't heard of starting T without experiencing dysphoria so that's why I am asking.
I got fed up with being misgendered every time I left the house.
Some would say that’s social dysphoria, but I don’t agree with this idea of locating the “wrong” in the individual person when it’s society that coercively genders people based on a few outdated rules about looks. I never liked boring macho outfits and I didn’t want to put on an overly masculine performance just to try to avoid the misgendering that way (and even then, I probably would’ve been just assumed to be a butch lesbian and misgendered anyway because of my “girly” features).
As it is now, I can dress in whatever I want, I don’t bother binding or packing (I never did as I have no problem with my anatomy), I can grow my hair, I can wear bright colours or not, and still after years on T no one questions me to the point of degendering. They may be thinking I’m “girly” or whatever, but they don’t assume “this person must be female”. So I can go places and not fret over this constantly. I don’t have to explain myself to every random stranger or endure the misgendering instead. I don’t have to deal with people’s cissexism every single time I interact with anyone who doesn’t already know me. It definitely brought my stress levels down.
That’s reason enough.
Yikes.
I don’t really know how to feel about this.
OR they’re lying
So what's the difference between you and any other transphobe? All you're saying here is that a trans person's experiences cannot be trusted if they happen to be different from yours. Textbook transphobia.
Good lord, I don't give enough of a shit about this hell site to invent random lies to post here. Why bother? Literally just summarizing what's true is enough to get a rise out of you people.
Just out of curiosity what was your reasoning for starting T? I have heard of non-dysphoric trans people but I haven't heard of starting T without experiencing dysphoria so that's why I am asking.
I got fed up with being misgendered every time I left the house.
Some would say that’s social dysphoria, but I don’t agree with this idea of locating the “wrong” in the individual person when it’s society that coercively genders people based on a few outdated rules about looks. I never liked boring macho outfits and I didn’t want to put on an overly masculine performance just to try to avoid the misgendering that way (and even then, I probably would’ve been just assumed to be a butch lesbian and misgendered anyway because of my “girly” features).
As it is now, I can dress in whatever I want, I don’t bother binding or packing (I never did as I have no problem with my anatomy), I can grow my hair, I can wear bright colours or not, and still after years on T no one questions me to the point of degendering. They may be thinking I’m “girly” or whatever, but they don’t assume “this person must be female”. So I can go places and not fret over this constantly. I don’t have to explain myself to every random stranger or endure the misgendering instead. I don’t have to deal with people’s cissexism every single time I interact with anyone who doesn’t already know me. It definitely brought my stress levels down.
That’s reason enough.
Yikes.
I don’t really know how to feel about this.
This just in, you are not allowed to have an identity that isn't truscum-approved! Even though it has no bearing on them whatsoever how you identify or not!
So I'm just going to come out and say it: if you're a self-identified truscum or transmed and only want to reblog my posts to go "yikes" like a petulant five-year old or tell me how much you disapprove, save yourself the trouble and don't touch this blog.
We will never agree and whether you approve of my basic existence or not makes no difference to me, or indeed anyone else.
every time I see more of the ‘ao3 is evil’ crap circulating I think, ‘well, tumblr is evil too and I don’t see you stop using it’
You know, the more I think about this, the more I think the real complaint isn’t that AO3 hosts “evil” content, it’s that it doesn’t allow harassment/dogpiling of “evil” creators as easily as Tumblr. Abuse won’t remove or even re-tag a work except in a handful of very specific cases, but they will suspend or ban users for harassment, including filing repeated unfounded Abuse reports. Authors also have at least some ability to screen/block comments on works, and there’s no direct messaging system outside of commenting on works through which to pursue harassment. You can follow a creator but you can’t block them (much less encourage others to do the same). Tumblr, by contrast, generally ignores any abuse report that doesn’t involve the DMCA, and aggressive anons can and have driven bloggers off the site entirely. The fact that the same tactics are used by social justice bloggers and neo-Nazis (for instance) doesn’t matter – they’re the affordances of the site, by accident or design, and an entire fannish generation have gotten very used to performing their fannish (and moral) identity in this fashion. (I thinks it’s relevant that AO3 was designed by fandom’s LJ generation and in some respect mirrors the affordances of LJ circa 2010. Tumblr is a very different site and that, moreso than age differences, seems to be at the root of this – though of course age intersect with site experience in a non-trivial way.)
ding ding ding ding.
Ao3 requires you to police your own consumption of content. Ao3 won’t let you destroy someone’s online presence simply because you don’t like it. Ao3 won’t let you impose your own morality on other without cause. If you have issues with this, and the fact that Ao3 requires you to have responsibility and agency, then you seriously need to sit down and have a damned good long hard look at yourself.
I remember, years and years ago, when I first tried to get into Tumblr. I left because of the dogpiling, and only came back because there was almost no one left in my old fandom environments on LJ. There is a LOT of content policing on Tumblr, and most of it seems to becoming from the kind of people who have no idea what Strikethrough is, or who have no idea that FFN used to host “M+” content - and why it doesn’t, anymore. I’ve said before, Tumblr is the platform of BNF’s, and is very anti-community. It’s strength lies in things like sharing and discoverability, but the fact of the matter is that compared to previous fandom forums - listservs/mailing lists, message boards, forums, journal comms, etc. - Tumblr’s design put the kibosh on fandom communities. It became a website centered around individual people, and BNFs thrive here for a reason. There’s a reason why the term “BNF” became in insult in Ye Olden Days of fandom - it was associated with bullying and prostelyzing. Tumblr is a website that not only allows bullies, but enables them. AO3 makes bullying extremely difficult, if not impossible to sustain, and that’s why so many people on Tumblr hate it.
I agree with pretty much all of this, even though I genuinely tried to give Tumblr a chance for what it is. Fact is I can only use it in random small doses. Which, you know, isn’t great because there are people whose content I enjoy here, but for a site that doesn’t even have a user-friendly design to begin with, I don’t owe it to anyone to sift through all the frankly uniformed bullshit on a daily basis too.
Once ever I submitted an abuse report, after receiving some pretty vile harassment from popular “LGBT” bloggers for using the word “queer” with more flippancy than they in their infinite 18-year-old wisdom felt I was entitled to as a self-identified queer person. Nothing was done. And Tumblr culture, much as I dislike using the term, is all about “justifiable” bullying - even though half the time you’re bullying other marginalised people who have perfectly good reason not to be satisfied with juvenile “us versus them, my identity is more valid than yours and I have more followers so shut up” politics.
AO3 isn’t anyone’s thought police and the internet should not be treated as daycare. I absolutely loathe some types of content myself, e.g. noncon being treated like it’s not a bad thing, but AO3 doesn’t actually stop me from criticising those things. And I understand, unlike the antis, that writers don’t owe me, a complete stranger, a full personal history to “prove” when they are in fact using it as a coping mechanism. You are not entitled to that degree of personal surveillance and you should in fact be alarmed that’s becoming the norm.
None of this means you can’t criticise or reject specific content. You can and there are many situations where you should. But this current climate of arbitrarily picking unspeakable topics and branding everyone who even tangentially disagrees with any part of how this policing is done an apologist for that topic isn’t how it’s done. Context exists and you should exercise enough discretion to tell whether you’re genuinely helping anything or just picking on other marginalised people who aren’t in a position to do any harm to anyone in reality.
But then what do you expect on a site that doesn’t let you leave comments and instead forces total fragmentation on every conversation here. Of course context is the first thing that goes.
a site that doesn’t let you leave comments and instead forces total fragmentation on every conversation here. Of course context is the first thing that goes.
Two-thirds of my problems with Tumblr, in a nutshell. And it kills me how many people don’t even realize this, because they’ve never been in a fandom with communities, and where conversations were linear and spaces were organized. I’ll be the first to admit that moderated communities had a lot of problems, but I’ll take them all back in a heart back, given the anarchic environment of Tumblr. Dogpiling happened then, too - but jesus, it was rarely or never as bad on journal-sites, message boards, or list-servs as it routinely is here on Tumblr. D:
And there were usually controls in place for the dogpiling - you really would need to have screwed up badly to have an entire community gang up on you, at least as far as I noticed. Some of the discourse would be outdated today, but that's only because people have largely left those sites so they stayed sort of frozen in time then.
But seriously, the first thing that bothered me about this site was the lack of comments/threading, and I still feel that's at fault for half the issues here.
someone named father-sarges-power-hour has hatefollowed you - they are an EXTREME antisemite and - well, pretty much very transphobic and anti-everything in your bio. Block them.
Wow, gotta admire these creeps I wouldn’t even have noticed if you hadn’t brought it to my attention! Blocked and they need to get a life.
I’m sorry but if you call commentary on intra community transphobia “homophobic” because its addressing specifically /bigotry inside supposedly safe LGBT spaces/ rather than being generalized about “all cis people,” you’re a goddamn transphobe trying to silence concern about serious intra community issues and are a TERF supporter, intentionally or not.
I’ve seen this happen on tumblr a few times- someone posts a self-help resource for mentally ill people, someone else comments “lol this is the most neurotypical thing I’ve ever seen” or something along those lines, and then someone has to come in and say “no, actually, this is something that helps a lot of mentally ill people cope”
people need to be cautious with immersing themselves in mental illness blogs on tumblr because a lot of them discourage people from managing their symptoms. there’s a mentality that if you aren’t this sick or you aren’t struggling this much then you’re just a neurotypical poser. it sucks.
AKA when "social justice" becomes about cursorily leaving snarky one-liners popularized by big name bullies and stops being about actually critically thinking about this society. That is the norm now.
ive said this before but how can u be attracted to only one gender like im not trying to be Problematic i just ,,,, there are so so many how can u only like 1 ???? what a concept imagine only being attracted to one gender how do u do that
I think sometimes I feel this way because of autism too like. I’m panromantic because gender is irrelevant to how I experience romantic attraction, which definitely has a lot to do with how autism impacts my general understanding of gender, so I genuinely have a hard time understanding how it works so differently for other people?
This is not to invalidate anyone’s identity, or say it’s bad or whatever, obviously. Just how the way my brain works makes me think sometimes
Oh someone finally said it!
Exactly, I don't experience gender categories the way I'm "supposed to" according to definitions made by neurotypicals who already had a problem with the concept of anyone being attracted to two genders and no more. This idea that sexuality "just exists" in a few universal categories without any personal, situational, mental etc modifiers and everyone has to experience it the same way isn't as helpful as people pretend it is. Especially to LGBTQ+ people who overlap with e.g. being autistic. There's nothing wrong with that because we're not all about "faking" your NT identity.
So yeah, exclusionary politics are ableist. Oops.
Help me move!
Hey I’m moving out at the end of this month to get away from an unsafe situation. If you could donate any bit of money I would really appreciate it. Please send me an ask if you donate and I will draw you a sketch. Thank you!
paypal.me/hopalongfrrog
if you guys could keep reblogging this and donating that would b super cool thanks !
I move in 2 weeks. Please consider donating and helping me out. Thank you!